Jan 22: When asked is there are worries about a pandemic? Trump responded: "No. Not at all. And we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s — going to be just fine." https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/22/tru ... r-control/

Jan 22: Sic et Non. Tom Cotton sent a letter to Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar encouraging the Trump administration to consider banning travel between China and the United States and warning that the Communist regime could be covering up how dangerous the disease really was. https://www.cotton.senate.gov/files/doc ... 0FINAL.pdf

Jan. 26: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called on the Department of Health and Human Services to declare coronavirus a public health emergency, which would free up $85 million in funding for federal agencies. “Should the outbreak get worse they’re going to need immediate access to critical federal funds that at present they can’t access,” Schumer said. https://nypost.com/2020/01/26/schumer-c ... emergency/

Jan. 28 : Washington state’s two Democratic senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, demanded in a letter that Azar keep them apprised “with the latest information regarding the severity of the disease, the country’s capacity to diagnose cases, what steps were being taken to prepare U.S. health care workers, what screening systems were in place at U.S. airports, the status of a novel coronavirus vaccine.” https://www.murray.senate.gov/public/in ... ECEA8AB771

Jan 28: Senator Tom Cotton sent a letter to the secretaries of state, health and human services, and homeland security, he noted that “no amount of screening [at airports] will identify a contagious-but-asymptomatic person afflicted with the coronavirus” and called for an immediate evacuation of Americans in China and a ban on all commercial flights between China and the United States. https://www.cotton.senate.gov/files/doc ... Letter.pdf

Feb 5: Sic et Non. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said that top Trump administration officials resisted calls from senators during a meeting on Feb. 5 ― a day prior to Trump’s acquittal in the Senate ― urging them to request emergency funding and to stockpile supplies to deal with the coming crisis.“They said they had it covered. Didn’t need any additional funding. What a fatal screw up,” Murphy tweeted.

Feb. 5, Murphy tweeted: “Just left the Administration briefing on Coronavirus. Bottom line: they aren't taking this seriously enough. Notably, no request for ANY emergency funding, which is a big mistake. Local health systems need supplies, training, screening staff etc. And they need it now.” https://news.yahoo.com/senator-says-whi ... 19950.html

Feb 5: HS Secretary Alex Azar requested $2 billion for medical equipment in early February but was rebuffed by White House officials who were upset about the price tag and the fact that Azar had gone around them to Congress. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national ... story.html

Feb 7: USA sends medical supplies to China. "This week the State Department has facilitated the transportation of nearly 17.8 tons of donated medical supplies to the Chinese people, including masks, gowns, gauze, respirators, and other vital materials. These donations are a testament to the generosity of the American people." https://www.state.gov/the-united-states ... ronavirus/

Feb 10: Trump hosts a rally in New Hampshire.

Feb 10: "A lot of people think that goes away in April."

Feb 10: "We only have 11 cases and they're all getting better."

Feb 14: Trump: "We have a very small number of people in the country, right now, with it. It’s like around 12. Many of them are getting better. Some are fully recovered already. So we’re in very good shape."

Feb 25: As the Stock Market begins to crash, Trump tries happy talk: “We’re very close to a vaccine.”

Feb 25: “We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here..and isn't it refreshing when contrasting it with the awful presidency of President Obama." - new Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany

Feb 26: "So we’re at the low level. As they get better, we take them off the list, so that we’re going to be pretty soon at only five people. And we could be at just one or two people over the next short period of time. So we’ve had very good luck.” https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-st ... onference/

Feb 29: "We've taken the most aggressive actions to confront the coronavirus. They are the most aggressive taken by any country."

Feb 29: Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told POLITICO that the intelligence briefings and warnings from the CDC and World Health Organization led him to become “alarmed that more was not being done to prepare the U.S. for the spread of this virus.” https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/3 ... ncy-155058

March 2: "They're going to have vaccines relatively soon and they're going to have something that actually makes you better and we think that's going to happen even sooner."

March 2: "I think its very safe" to keep holding campaign rallies.

March 3: Do you think its inevitable that this will spread across the country? "No I don't think that's inevitable at all."

March 4: Trump calls it the "Corona Flu" .. "At this moment we think we have it very much in hand ... [W]e have a very small number of people in this country [infected]. We have a big country. The biggest impact we had was when we took the 40-plus people [from a cruise ship]. … We brought them back. We immediately quarantined them. But you add that to the numbers. But if you don’t add that to the numbers, we’re talking about very small numbers in the United States.” https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-st ... line-ceos/

March 5: Trump on Hannity: "Its not that severe."

March 6: "I would rather (Cruise ship passengers stay aboard) because I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship."

March 6: The crisis is “an unforeseen problem” that “came out of nowhere”

March 7: Trump: "Very soon, we're going to come up [with a vaccine]." Dr. Fauci says we are at least 12-18 months away from a vaccine.

March 8: Trump played golf

March 8: "Going to a rally, there's no reason that you shouldn't go." - Ben Carson when asked about Trump rallies.

March 9: “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!” https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/sta ... 6314869761

March 10: VP Pence said Trump instructs everyone to shake hands when they want to shake hands. "I expect the President will continue to do it. I'll continue to do it."

March 11: On the same day the WHO declares COVID-19 a pandemic, Trump uses a prime-time Oval Office address to announce a ban on travel for non-Americans from most of Europe. He misstates a freeze on cargo and falsely said the health insurance industry has "agreed to waive all co-payments for coronavirus treatments."

March 11: “We’re having to fix a problem that, four weeks ago, nobody ever thought would be a problem.”

March 14: “It’s something that nobody expected.”

March 15: Devin Nunes (R) on FOX News: “If you’re healthy, you and your family, it’s a great time to go out and go to a local restaurant, likely you can get in easy. Let’s not hurt the working people in this country...go to your local pub”

March 16: Harvard University epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch, director of Harvard’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, said "This was foreseeable, and foreseen, weeks and months ago, and only now is the White House coming out of denial and heading straight into saying it could not have been foreseen.”

March 17: Trump: "I've always known this is a real, this is a pandemic, long before it was called a pandemic."

March 22: Trump tweeted: "WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!"

March 30: By the end of the day, roughly 280 million masks from warehouses around the U.S. had been purchased by foreign buyers and were earmarked to leave the country, according to the broker — and that was in one day. https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisal ... 57b4a756d4

Mar 31: Trump says "We inherited obsolete tests" in a statement that reveals his lack of understanding about testing. Tests on novel viruses can only be developed once the genetic sequencing of the virus has been provided. It was impossible for Obama to have had tests for a virus that didn't exist at the time.

April 1: Trump officials recently contacted Thai officials to request they send a bunch of supplies to the US. The incredulous Thai officials responded by pointing out that the US was requesting precisely the same supplies the US had just sent to Thailand. The US then halted all aid it was sending out so they figure out what, exactly, they were doing. The Trump admin is, always has been, and always will be a clown car of bewildering incompetence. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/3 ... w8yA8fcry0

April 1: One of the nation's largest commercial labs has faced a backlog of tests that ballooned in the last two weeks, and has delayed results in some cases up to 10 days. New Jersey-based Quest Diagnostics had about 160,000 coronavirus test orders waiting to be processed on March 25, which amounted to about half of the 320,000 total orders for the tests the company had received up to that date https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/01/politics ... mHGc0HURZw

April 1: Trump says no national policy on mitigating the virus because in some places like Alaska you wouldn’t need it. Alaskan governor already implemented a stay at home order that Trump didn’t know about.

Florida GOP Governor Ron DeSantis said he hasn’t implemented any orders in the State because the White House hasn’t directed him to.
Mike Pence said the task force will continue to defer to State governors to make up their own decisions as to what they want to do.
Surgeon General advised all Americans to stay home and said he believes the Task Force guidelines is a National stay at home order, contrary to what Pence said.

GOP states have been receiving a wealth of supplies even more than they asked for from the Federal stockpile, while Democrat states like Illinois, Massachusetts and Main have secured only a fraction of their requests.

April 1: Forbes reports that “roughly 280 million masks from warehouses around the U.S. had been purchased by foreign buyers and were earmarked to leave the country, according to the broker - and that was in one day.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisal ... 5349a156d4

April 2: JARED KUSHNER: "The notion of the federal stockpile was it's supposed to be our stockpile. It's not supposed to be states stockpiles that they then use."

April 2: Trump refuses to order nationwide shutdown because he thinks the state governors should decide what's best for their states. Dr. Fauci says "If you look at what's going on in this country, I just don't understand why we're not doing that. We really should be." https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dr-antho ... 491833e4a3

April 3: The Obama administration green lit a machine designed to church out millions of protective respirator masks at high speed during a pandemic. Trump's HHS Department squashed it. So not only did Obama NOT leave the federal government with no plan/"empty shelves," but it was TRUMP who actually ENSURED that they would be empty. https://www.washingtonpost.com/investig ... Mb84gPlurg

April 3: Trump cracks a joke at his briefing. "The models show hundreds of thousands of people are going to die and you know what I want to do? I want to come way under the model. The professionals did the models and I was never involved in a model. At least this kind of a model."

Kushner's claim remains at odds with US Code, and they can't change that. 42 U.S. Code § 247d–6b (A)(3)(J): "The Secretary, in managing the stockpile... shall provide assistance... to maintain and improve State and local public health preparedness capabilities to distribute and dispense medical ...products from the stockpile"

Rather than do everything he can do to save lives in New York right now, Trump seems to prefer holding ventilators in reserve for a future circumstance where other states (perhaps ones more crucial to his reelection hopes) are in need. https://www.vox.com/2020/4/3/21207650/t ... tors-cuomo

April 4: medical supplies our tax dollars paid for in the national stockpile are being distributed to private companies who then sell them to the highest bidder. Basically, just like various state governors have been claiming. https://twitter.com/julieannemery/statu ... 0148671491

April 4: Immediately after Fauci makes an impassioned case that social distancing works, Trump says, "but again, we're not going to destroy our country. We have to get back ... we have a big decision to make at a certain point ... the cure cannot be worse than the problem itself." https://twitter.com/AlexandreKrausz/sta ... 19040?s=20

April 5: "I answered this 15 times. You don't have to answer." -- Trump prevents Dr Fauci from answering a question about hydroxychloroquine

April 5: Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) slammed Donald Trump’s inadequate action in the battle against the COVID-19 crisis, saying the president doesn’t understand the meaning of the word “federal” or the role he is supposed to fulfill. “If [the Trump administration] had started in February building ventilators, getting ready for this pandemic, we would not have the problems that we have today and frankly, very many fewer people would die,” Pritzker said.

April 5: "You should be thanking them for what they have done, not always asking wise guy questions" -- Trump ends the press briefing by berating an Associated Press reporter who dared to ask him about the government's slow response to coronavirus

April 5: "For any country. Our country had the greatest economic boom in history," Trump says, falsely. Growth was stronger for periods under Obama, not to mention numerous previous eras!

April 6: AMA President Dr. Patrice Harris rebuke's Trump's remarks. “There could be deaths. This is a new virus, and so we should not be promoting any medication or drug for any disease that has not been proven and approved by the FDA.” What do you have to lose? “You could lose your life,” Harris said. “It’s unproven. And so certainly there are some limited studies, as Dr. Fauci said. But at this point, we just don’t have the data to suggest that we should be using this medication for COVID-19.” https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ama-pres ... d76c663197

April 6: In late January, President Trump's economic adviser Peter Navarro warned his White House colleagues the novel coronavirus could take more than half a million American lives and cost close to $6 trillion, according to memos obtained by Axios. https://www.axios.com/exclusive-navarro ... 382a9.html

Ah, yes, the 10th amendment. The famous amendment that established the United States as a weak confederacy that makes the President have to *checks notes* systematically downplay a global pandemic and lie about federal response.

I think Pelosi underreacted given available information, but she was indeed responding to racial fears leading to business discrimination against Asians a couple weeks prior to when the public push for lock-down orders began in earnest. As it turns out, the Asian dominated areas of the country were and are some of the safer spots because of early warnings from cultural connections abroad and a stronger culture towards infection mitigation behavior. If you were gonna shop anywhere, Chinatown was as good of a place as any. Of course, bringing Pelosi doing this in late Feb up is meant to suggest that Trump's systematic downplaying of the virus threat in public and unbelievably bungled federal response wasn't a notable failure. Just par for the course. Whatabout whatabout whatabout. This is false, though, as there were warnings all over the place - that's what Trump was downplaying - that were being ignored.

This is ambitious, because we all lived through it just a few months ago.

I don't know if it is part of what you are capturing, but March 11 seems like a watershed date. That was the day Tom Hanks was confirmed as infected along with his wife, Rita Wilson. And the NBA became the first major sports league to postpone it's season as players tested positive. It seemed like it shifted public dialogue. I look at it as the day most people I knew started taking it seriously. In Utah it went from, "It's just the flu, brah" to, "Buy all the toilet paperz!!!!"

Last edited by honorentheos on Sun May 10, 2020 5:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.

NBC News spoke to the wife, who said they learned of chloroquine's connection to coronavirus during a President Donald Trump news conference, which "was on a lot actually." They took it because they "were afraid of getting sick," she said.

Has anyone forgotten? If they have, it’s probably on account of how little was said, and how meaningless it turned out to be. From the transcript, here is the full extent of Trump’s attention devoted to the coronavirus:

“Protecting Americans’ health also means fighting infectious diseases. We are coordinating with the Chinese government and working closely together on the coronavirus outbreak in China. My administration will take all necessary steps to safeguard our citizens from this threat.”

Trump spent more time talking about Venezuela. : D

And he certainly has little to show for his promise of taking “all the necessary steps”.

But I get it. Trump simply mentioned the coronavirus for a brief 30 seconds and that’s all it took for you to be convinced that he was serious about it. Kind of like how evangelicals buy into his BS of being a good, practicing Christian. Because he says so, right?

The GOP had the perfect opportunity to save this country from what's happened the last couple months by simply doing their job and voting to remove him from office on the impeachment vote, but senate Republicans are assholes, thieves and hypocrites, craven to their core, and decided their whiny future in politics was more important than their country.

Senate Republicans (except Romney) are negligent mass murderers, just like the President.

And as a result, they've ____ the economy, the one thing they had going for them. Good. ____ those assholes. Every cloud has a silver lining. If the GOP retains their majority in the senate this November, this country deserves to die.

Well, damn. Looking back at that SOTU speech mentioned by subs, it’s looking like Trump can’t even hold to the one vague promise that he made within his 30 seconds of time devoted to the subject of the coronavirus ...

President Donald Trump on Sunday lambasted CBS News and its flagship “60 Minutes” program for “doing everything within their power … to defend China” after an episode that explored his coronavirus conspiracy mongering.

The “60 Minutes” segment reported that Trump’s administration had defunded — for political reasons — a nonprofit engaged in potentially lifesaving research about bat-borne coronaviruses, including the one causing the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the episode, eminent virologist Peter Daszak — who’d raised the alarm about a possible pandemic as far back as 2003 — said the National Institutes of Health had recently canceled a grant to his EcoHealth Alliance, though the organization’s work is very relevant to the ongoing outbreak, which scientists think originated in bats.

NIH confirmed to USA Today that it axed EcoHealth Alliance’s grant last month, but would not elaborate on the reason.

“60 Minutes” asserted that the organization — which has been receiving NIH funding since at least 2002 — had been singled out because of “pandemic politics.”

For 15 years, EcoHealth Alliance has worked with the internationally renowned Wuhan Institute of Virology to catalog bat-borne illnesses, “60 Minutes” said. Such research has been and remains critical to the understanding of diseases like COVID-19.

But in recent weeks, the Wuhan Institute, which is located in the same city where the new coronavirus was first reported, has come under scrutiny from Trump and some of his allies who’ve claimed ― without evidence or scientific backing ― that COVID-19 was potentially engineered at the institute or elsewhere in China and either accidentally or purposefully unleashed on the world.

“I think [China] made a horrible mistake and they didn’t want to admit it,” Trump said last week. Many scientists have stressed that there’s no evidence COVID-19 was manmade.

Still, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), a vocal defender of Trump, suggested last month that the virus could have been made at the Wuhan Institute, which he erroneously said had received a ”$3.7 million grant” from the NIH.

That grant, as “60 Minutes” noted, had in fact been given to EcoHealth Alliance and not to the institute. According to Daszak, the nonprofit has spent about $100,000 annually to collaborate with Wuhan researchers ― a collaboration that he said is essential to helping the U.S. prepare for pandemics like the one currently ravaging the globe.

“If we want to know anything about the next pandemic we need to be working in China,” Daszak told USA Today.

“In peoples’ imaginations there might be this image of one person in a lab in China who drops a petri dish and that somehow leads to a massive outbreak,” Daszak continued. “It’s just not like that. Every year there are millions of people going in bat caves and hunting and eating wildlife. It happens every day. They are being exposed to bat viruses every day. It only takes one of these people to go to a city, cough and spread a virus. The aim of our work is to directly benefit U.S. national security and public health. If we don’t do this we are going to be on the front line again when the next virus hits.”

Trump appeared to respond to the “60 Minutes” episode in a tweet on Sunday.

CBS News and “60 Minutes” are “doing everything within their power, which is far less today than it was in the past, to defend China and the horrible Virus pandemic that was inflicted on the USA and the rest of the World. I guess they want to do business in China!” the president wrote.

Daszak told “60 Minutes” that conspiracy mongering by Trump and his allies has been a major obstacle in the world’s fight against COVID-19.

“This politicization of science is really damaging,” he said. “You know, the conspiracy theories out there have essentially closed down communication between scientists in China and scientists in the U.S. We need that communication in an outbreak to learn from them how they control it so we can control it better. It’s sad to say, but it will probably cost lives.”

“This politicization of science is really damaging,” he said. “You know, the conspiracy theories out there have essentially closed down communication between scientists in China and scientists in the U.S. We need that communication in an outbreak to learn from them how they control it so we can control it better. It’s sad to say, but it will probably cost lives.”

This precisely gets at the fundamental reason I hate religious thinking so much. I could be totally OK with people's magical thinking if they kept that ____ ____ to themselves. Leaping from this is something I believe to everyone should honor my evidence-free thoughts is where I have a big ____ problem.